The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (13 page)

“Sit down,” said The Avenger.

“Wait till my men get here—” sputtered the mining magnate.

“Sit down!
” snapped Benson. There was the crack of a whiplash in his voice.

Almost without realizing what he was doing, Adams sat down on the edge of his bed. He stared with wide eyes at the death-mask face of The Avenger.

There was a banging at the door. Benson had locked it, hand behind him, when he walked into the room. The guards were trying to get in now.

“Tell them everything is all right and to go away,” Benson ordered.

Adams had intelligence, and he was wide awake by now. Obviously, he reasoned that if his life were in danger, it would be the easiest thing in the world for this white-haired young man to kill him if he tried to call for help.

“You, out there in the hall,” he growled. “I’m all right. This is a friend. Go and take your guard positions again.”

“You sure you don’t need help, boss?”

“No! Go away!” yelled Adams, at the look in the chill, colorless eyes.

Footsteps faded down the hall. The Avenger nodded. “That’s better. And I assure you you’re in no danger. I’ll introduce myself. I am Richard Henry Benson.”

Adams was a mining and railroad power. In both circles he had heard of the vastly wealthy Benson. Also it would seem that he had heard of The Avenger’s more widely known activity of crime fighting. For his face paled a little.

“Mr. Benson! If you had just sent your name in—”

“You would have told me, if I were the President himself, that I’d have to wait till morning to see you,” said Benson calmly. “And as I said, I have no time to spare. What do you know of the psychiatrist, Dr. Fram?”

“Dr. F-Fram?” sputtered Adams, caught off-balance by the unexpectedness of the question. “Why, he is a fine nerve and brain specialist and a great psychiatrist. That is all I know of him.”

“You have seen him several times recently.”

“Yes. About my son,” said Adams.

“But you have never brought the boy into Fram, personally.”

“That’s right.” Adams seemed very anxious indeed to answer all questions openly. “I don’t take Robert out if I can avoid it.”

“I would like to see your son, please.”

Adams attempted bluster again. “Surely you can take my word for it that it was about Robert that I visited Fram—” he began. His voice faded out.

“That will be easy,” he resumed in a different tone.

“My boy sleeps in the adjoining room, where I can keep an eye on him.”

Adams stepped to a doorway, reached in the next room and clicked on a light. Benson watched over his shoulder.

A youngster of nineteen or so had been asleep in a tousled bed. He was blinking now, looking at his father.

The Avenger needed only a glance. Fram might be a fine psychiatrist. The Avenger was a great one. He needed only a glimpse of the boy’s wide, vacant eyes and too-bulging forehead and fluttering, uncertain hands to know that there was a person in need of mental attention.

“Thank you,” he said.

Adams clicked out the light and closed the door.

“If you don’t mind, tell me what this is about,” he said, with a certain dignity.

“It’s about the Bison Park steal.” As he said the words, Benson’s eyes took on their diamond-drill hardness. Few could meet those eyes and lie.

Adams met them squarely. “I know of Bison Park,” he said. “But what is this about a steal?”

The Avenger’s steely fingers drummed lightly for a moment while he searched the eyes of the mining man. Then, with surprising candor, he told him.

“Somebody is trying to have Bison Park opened to private bidding and to grab it off, to obtain a deposit of helium located there,” he said. “They are trying to frighten certain senators into getting legislation through that will remove the park from government control. Your name has come into the deal several times.”

“My name? I swear Bison Park could never be anything to me, no matter what the government did with it. But how could anyone scare senators into
that
kind of a bill? It’s not a well-known park; so, no doubt, a few men could jam it through. But later, when the public found out and learned that a helium supply had been given away, those men would be all through politically! What possible fear could make senators commit political suicide by proposing such legislation?”

The Avenger did not answer that one. But he knew.

It had to do with little red men, scarcely three feet high, and smiling green dogs.

At almost that exact moment, Nellie Gray and Nan Stanton were seeing one of these incredible creations. It was in the hall of the hotel where The Avenger had reserved half a floor for himself and his aides.

The two girls had come out of the big living room in Benson’s suite. They were about to separate and go to their respective rooms for some sleep. High time, too; it was getting on toward dawn.

“Want me to stay in your room with you?” said Nellie. “Are you afraid?”

Any stranger hearing that would have smiled. Frail, dainty, pink-and-white Nellie Gray looked as if she could not have protected a lump of sugar from the onslaughts of a butterfly. But Nan Stanton had seen her in action and took the offer seriously—and gratefully.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t believe there is any danger—”

She stopped, and stared over Nellie’s shoulder down the hall. She glared with bulging eyes in which there was a colossal fear; a horror even greater than had been in them when she was bundled into that sedan to die of carbon-monoxide gas.

Nellie whirled, and a gasp came from her own soft, red lips.

Down there, plainly to be seen in the hall light, was something that just shouldn’t be. Something that obviously couldn’t be. Only—there it was.

A bright-red man with a dog!

The man was a miniature, scarcely a yard high. He was soberly dressed in striped trousers, cutaway, wing collar; and this sartorial perfection was topped by a glossy silk hat.

The dog he was leading—on a leash made of some sort of flowers braided together—was green. And it was smiling!

It practically leered at the two astounded girls, as if it knew a secret that was very funny, if a little grim, which it did not intend to share with anyone.

A smiling green dog led by a little bright-red man!

“Do . . . do you see it?” whispered Nan, with a chattering of even white teeth.

Nellie did not reply.

The diminutive blond bombshell had one cardinal rule of life: When you see anything inexplicable, investigate it as promptly as possible.

She sprang down the hall toward the crazy vision. And Nan, who had courage herself, given this example of fearlessness, ran after her.

Then the little man and smiling green dog weren’t in the hall any more. But there had been a whisking open and shut of the door to the hall stairs.

“They’re taking to the stairs!” panted Nellie. “After them! Don’t let them get away!”

“And if they really aren’t there . . . to get away?” gasped Nan.

“Then I want to know that, too,” said Nellie grimly.

Her small white hand was on the knob of the hall-stairs door. She jerked the door open and jumped onto the stair landing, with Nan at her dainty heels.

The two leaped straight into oblivion. Light, sounds and intelligence faded out in their numbing brains and they fell.

The Avenger sat in a shaft of morning sunlight at a desk. The bright sun brought out in bold relief the unusual appearance of the man.

His white hair, thick and virile for all its lack of color, was like hard silver. His face seemed more ashy white than ever—and more emotionless. His eyes were like ice in a polar dawn.

The desk at which he sat held a curious thing. In outward appearance it was an ordinary small traveling case; but its contents were far from ordinary.

In the case were about all the aids to disguise ever invented. The top tray held dozens of pairs of little glass eyecups, tissue thin, with various colors of pupils glazed on them. These could be slipped over Benson’s colorless orbs to give him any color eyes he wished.

Under that tray were wigs, pads to change cheek contour, transparent adhesive and half a hundred tiny pots of pigment for skin coloration.

The top of the case held a mirror. The Avenger was peering first into that mirror at his own reflection, and then at a picture propped right next to it.

The picture was of Tetlow Adams.

As Benson stared, he worked at his own face, shaping it over to resemble Adams.

In a remarkably short time, The Avenger’s face was that of Adams. And when he slipped blue cups over his eyes, the resemblance was startling. Only a very close friend of the mining man’s, after a careful look, could have told that this was not Adams.

The Avenger put on iron-gray hair over his own thick white shock, dressed in a brown pin-striped suit of the type Adams often wore, and went out.

He went to the Capital Building.

The Senate was convened; it was ten o’clock in the morning. Benson went to the gallery. The guard there greeted him respectfully.

“Morning, Mr. Adams.”

So, apparently, the mining man had come here often!

The Avenger sat down quietly, and stared at the semicircular rows of desks beneath, identifying the various members of the Senate.

At the same time, Mac and Smitty were cruising slowly along 4½ Street.

They were down there, watching the house in which Josh had been held in particular, and the whole neighborhood in general, on the faint chance that they would find a clue to the whereabouts of Nellie Gray and Nan Stanton.

The two girls had been gone all the early morning. And Smitty was wild.

“Doggone that little blond halfpint,” he growled. “She isn’t happy if she doesn’t head into some kind of trouble that even a marine would go miles out of his way to avoid: I don’t know why any of us bother to help her out again.”

Mac only grunted. Smitty’s words went in one homely Scotch ear and out the other. Mac knew that the giant was only talking; that he wouldn’t eat or sleep till he’d rescued that frail-looking little fighter from her current mess.

If he could!

Because one of these days she was going to get in so deep she wouldn’t get out. Except in a coffin.

“Whoosh!” sighed the Scot. “I wish we had just a bit of lead to worrrk on—Is that a handkerchief wavin’ from yon window?”

It wasn’t. It was a diaper, hanging in a window to dry, not a furtive distress signal from a prisoner.

The two cruised on.

Josh and Rosabel, equally worried about Nellie, were on another assignment given by The Avenger.

That trail lay along the path of little red men and smiling green dogs. They were following out the lead provided by the little black book of the murdered veterinarian, Quinn.

Benson had told them to locate the dachshund answering to the name of Bob. The one listed in the small black book as having had its vocal cords cut. They were to report on the nature of its owner.

There were several thousand dachshunds in the city; but fortunately only a few dozen had been recently sold by pet shops. And Benson had told them to look for a recent sale.